Russia and Ukraine face off at European security conference as the shadow of Trump 2.0 looms large
The OSCE may have survived another year but the European security order it is meant to guard is in peril.
By Tetyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff
As the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe heads into 2025, the year that marks the 50th anniversary of its foundation during a period of Cold War detente, its 57 participating states managed to agree on a new leadership team after months of wrangling. The unanimous decision, approved by the organisation's permanent council on December 2, 2024, was supported by Russia and Ukraine and their respective allies and partners. Given that the OSCE had been without permanent leadership since early September, when the mandate of the previous secretary general and senior officers came to an end this is a major breakthrough.
The new leadership team of the OSCE includes the veteran Turkish diplomat Feridun Sinirlioğlu as the new secretary general. Maria Telalian, the head of the legal department in the Greek foreign ministry will assume the role of Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. The current Dutch ambassador to the OSCE, Christophe Kamp, will serve as OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. Jan Braathu, a Norwegian who has led the OSCE Mission to Serbia since January 2021, will become OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.
This means that the OSCE leadership, for the next three years, will be made up of individuals exclusively from NATO members. Russia's agreement to this slate of candidates is therefore quite remarkable, as is the fact that an alternative proposal by Malta, which held the OSCE's rotating chair in 2024, was discarded. Malta's suggestion also included Kamp and Braathu, but also Igli Hasani, a former Albanian foreign minister and Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities, as a potential secretary general and Ketevan Tsikhelashvili, the current Georgian ambassador to the OSCE, as nominee for the role of high commissioner. That both were ultimately dropped was partly due to the insistence by Greece and Turkey to have their two jointly-nominated candidates considered and a lack of opposition, especially to the Turkish candidate, by Armenia and Cyprus with their historically difficult relations with Turkey.
While this signals an all-around greater pragmatism in the capitals of OSCE participating states, it cannot paper over the deep cracks in the organisation. These became apparent during the testy statements by foreign ministers at the annual ministerial council meeting in Malta on December 5-6.
Most of the disagreements are, of course, about the Russian aggression against Ukraine. While not directly justifying Moscow's invasion, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, didn't even blink an eye when he accused the west of ignoring the fact that the "Nazi regime in Kiyv has, since 2017, adopted a series of laws that exterminate the Russian language in all spheres." His US counterpart, Antony Blinken, responded by calling out Lavrov's "tsunami of misinformation" and quoted extensively from President Putin's long catalogue of statements denying the existence of a Ukrainian state and people. As evident from a range of other statements during the ministerial council deliberations, there is no open support for Russia's position, except from Belarus. Yet, an east-west divide remains: while the European Union and all its member states were unequivocal in the condemnation of Russia's aggression, others, like Armenia, only generally referred to the importance of OSCE principles -- without mentioning Russia's violation of them.
Russia's isolation in the OSCE over the war in Ukraine stands in contrast to the Kremlin's relative success in using other multilateral formats to reshape the European security order that was built on the respect of the sovereign equality and territorial integrity of the OSCE's participating states as enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe.
Unsurprisingly, Lavrov noted the "mutually beneficial cooperation within the framework of the SCO, CIS, EAEU, CSTO, the Union State of Russia and Belarus and other Eurasian structures". Yet, their effectiveness overall for advancing specifically Russian interests is in doubt. Among them, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS are probably the most advanced endeavours -- but they are led by China and primarily serve Beijing's aspirations first and Moscow's a distant second at best.
Not only is the OSCE the largest regional security organisation by virtue of its 57 participating states but it remains the only one in which Russia and the west regularly interact. Lavrov's warning that "the OSCE exists as long as there is a consensus, as long as each state has guarantees that its interests will be taken into account" should therefore be taken less as a threat of Russia leaving the organisation and more as an acknowledgement that the Kremlin has few, if any, credible alternatives to remain a relevant diplomatic player in the reshaping of the European security order.
With expectations of a diplomatic initiative by the incoming Trump administration as high as ever, the question that was left unanswered at the OSCE ministerial council was about the future role of the organisation in Ukraine. The OSCE has a long history in Ukraine and faces a number of opportunities and challenges in supporting the country's post-war recovery, reintegration, and EU accession. The Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, specifically acknowledged that "the OSCE should play a role in the implementation of the Peace Formula" advocated by Ukraine.
Sybiha was also unequivocal that there should be no return to the division of Europe into spheres of influence reminiscent of the outcomes of the February 1945 Yalta conference or the Minsk accords of September 2014 and February 2015. Yet, such an outcome of rewarding the Kremlin for its aggression is increasingly likely despite its inherent risks.
This may restore a form of cold peace and stability to the European continent for the time being. It also underlines, however, that while the OSCE and its participating states may have secured the organisation's operational and administrative survival, the same cannot be said for the European security order it is meant to guard.
An earlier version of this article was published by The Conversation on 11 December 2024.
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